I just bought a small, cheap mp3 player (Trio brand; model A1000; 4gb; by Mach Speed).
It works okay, but not great. Right now my biggest problem is the low volume of the sound that comes through the supplied earbuds. At it’s loudest setting the volume is fine for sitting in a quiet room, but not for walking down a city street or anywhere that has the slightest ambient noise. (Now, I have no intention of blasting out my eardrums – I’m a middle-aged guy who likes Sinatra and showtunes. I just need it to get loud enough to be heard when there are competing sounds around.)
I get my tunes from CDs I already own. I rip the CDs with Media Player.
Is there a way to load them “louder,” or is that an absurd notion to begin with? Or, is there a way to boost the playback beyond the max volume setting of 32 (no, not 11!)? The anemic user’s manual that came with this thing utterly sucks, so there is no mention of such an option with the literature I have. But I thought that if the player was generic enough there might be a well-known universal work-around that you guys would know about.
Have you tried just swapping out the earbuds for a better pair? It may be that they’re just cheap and feeble.
Alternatively (this might not be a desireable alternative though), you can adjust your MP3s to play louder using a batch MP3 normalizer, such as MP3Gain (the adjustments made by this software are non-destructive and reversible - they don’t incur losses in the fidelity that might accompany recompression of the data)
This would be the first thing I’d try. Earbuds that come included are often sub-par.
(If you’re reluctant to shell out the money for a better pair without knowing whether that’s really the problem, you might see if a buddy who has a decent pair of earbuds would let you try them out on your player.)
Could it have a region setting that’s set to Europe/EU? My Sansa Clip+ plays much louder when its region is set to non-European - this is because EU legislation imposes quite a low limit on the maximum volume of personal audio devices.
You can also make your own headphone amp. Circuit schematics are available all over the Web, and you can easily make one that fits into a Mentos tin. This is the usual final project assignment for the electronics lab here.
Hey I didn’t know this! I am going to check my Clip tonight and see if I can change the settings. It’s a great player, but not much volume. I don’t listen to earbuds often but plug it into my car’s aux port, and sometimes it’s not loud enough with Clip and car unit both turned up full.
Does playing your portable MP3 player on maximum volume run the battery down faster?
Does your cars AUX port have any kind of level adjustment?
I second both trying mp3 gain and a different set of headphones. mp3 gain is free and very easy to use - it’s the only way I can get the audio loud enough to hear in my work truck when I use the line out on my iPod.
As a side note how loud a speaker plays with a given amount of power is called sensitivity (or efficiency). While cheap speakers (or headphones) may be more likely to have low sensitivity some very expensive speakers designed for high sound quality may also have low sensitivity.